ziparumpazoo

According to my Endomondo app, I've ran over 100km since the end of August. 122.99, to be exact. Possibly why my already old runners are starting to feel a little flat. I'm also going to need to maybe learn to make friends with the treadmill if I want to keep up this pace over the winter. Running outside at night is fantastic, frostbite and cold-triggered asthma, not so much.

Watched The Other Boleyn Girl last night and found myself near tears at the end, even though, and thank you PBS documentaries, I knew how it would end. The cinematography was gorgeous, with the use of mood setting color - golds and soft greens used for the idealistic country scenes, dark blues and greys for the cold and calculating Court. But it was Natalie Portman's Anne who really blew me away. It's easy to forget was a skilled actress Portman is, until you see her in a role this varied. Not that Scarlett Johansson is any slouch, but this version of the story portrays Mary as much gentler and even tempered than her sister Anne. I don't know how historically accurate the plot line was (see above, pretty cinematography), but it was an interesting angle portraying the Boleyn sisters time at King Henry's Court from Anne and Mary's point of view for the most part, putting a spin on, and adding complexity to the PBS versions that paints them as conniving and power hungry.

Fic rec for the Natasha/Steve folks on my list (and wow I haven't done this for a long time)...it's older and probably I am the last to know as usual:
Without the Usual Cost of Labor by vain_glorious - "Someone just reported to SHIELD that whatever was stolen produced "viable offspring", and we're hoping that doesn't mean what we thinks is does," Bruce says, evidently deciding to take over for Tony after only one masturbation joke.
Baby!fic, kinda, wherein the entire story reads like a running Tony monologue. Sweet without being saccharine, and with a side serving of enough almost-crack to make me grin. Gen and PG.

I'm away from the office on training this week. Pros: I'm away from the office all week. Cons: the course isn't very good or as in depth as advertised. Sad when the other students are asking you questions because they are unsatisfied by the instructor's answers.

I thought long and hard for something witty or entertaining to post this week, but that ain't happening.
Here, have a picture of a duck photobombing my goose picture instead:


Also, it is officially fall.


Signal boost:fringe_exchange sign ups are open. I'm not in a place where I can make that kind of creative commitment this year, but don't let that stop you from signing up. (It really is a low pressure exchange. And fun.)

It's been so incredibly long since I last posted that I don't even know where to start. Short form: Got my boat operator's license card (it says I'm Competent. whoohoo!), recovering from a minor car accident takes way longer than I'd like (being 20 definitely wasted on 20 year olds), but the kayaking is helping with the upper back problems so long as I don't overdo it. I overdo it. Work was soul-crushingly busy. Went on holidays. Returned to work. Less soul-crushing, but still busy. I can live with that.

Some kayak photos:
( here there be photos )

Reading:
Started reading Wool by Hugh Howey, but had to put it down after the first chapter because those kind of gory bait-and-switch surprises are not what I'm looking for in my summer vacation reading.

Then I read The Giver by Lois Lowry, which I really enjoyed, right up until the ending, which I felt was a cheat for the character of Jonas. Again, the kind of twist not a summer reading priority, however the book is a deeper social commentary than it first appears and I'm still thinking it over.

Books I did enjoy so far this summer: The Martian by Andy Weir, for it's sly portrayal of space exploration in the Chris Hadfield-age of social media (not to mention that it's sometimes downright funny to the space exploration geek in me), and Percy Jackson - The Titan's Curse (Rick Riordan), because it was handy and surprisingly immersive for children's lit, despite the writing style.

Currently reading Mr. Mercedes (Stephen King) because at least I know to expect death and destruction and not to get too attached to any of the secondary characters (or even the ones in the opening chapters - no thank you Hugh Howey)

Watching: What, are you kidding? It's summer! Why are you people in front of your tv's?
Ok, seriously, watching Longmire still and I take back my grumblings at the beginning of season three about dropped plot lines. I'm going to need a second watch of this season end-to-end without all the Viagra commercials though. Graham Greene is killing me playing the bad guy after growing up watching him play mostly the stereo typical comedic or wise Indian roles on tv here.

So. Hi. How are you all?

Remix Redux 11 went live last night and I was the happy recipient of:

Dark and Stormy (The Last Tent Remix) (1442 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Stargate SG-1
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Jack O'Neill, Sam Carter, Daniel Jackson, Teal'c (SG-1)
Summary:

Sleeping in tents in a storm on another planet was just like old times.

A fantastic remix of Though Never So Rough and Grim (SG-1, Gen), it takes the snarky one-shot of an original and fleshes it out into something warm and nostaligic. All I can say is "squeeee!".

Been picking at other PB prompts and almost forgot I'd been messing with this one...

First Press (896 words) by ziparumpazoo
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Almost Human
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Dorian/John Kennex
Characters: Dorian, John Kennex
Additional Tags: handjobs, First Times, porn!fail, pornbattle
Summary: Dorian has a problem. John has instructions.


*non-photographic fannish content! *gasp!* IKR?

Yeah, so no questionnaire this year - the list is far too short. Fringe gave me an ending that felt complete, and while I enjoyed The Americans, I felt in no way fannish about it. The rest of the year was spent reading books and trawling the old archives of closed-canon fandoms. RL didn't leave much in the tank this year, and the brain, she needed a rest.

So, without further ado, 2013's Fic Review - A Collection of Snippets, smut, and obscurity...

Worship - Fringe (R/Explicit), Peter's never considered himself a religious man. (Olivia/Peter)
Living Like There's Nothing Left to Lose - Fringe (Mature), Post episode 5.08, Olivia and Peter take a moment to breathe
All In - BSG (PG), Kara says, "Marry me, Lee" and the crowd around the table goes quiet. A rescued snippet that lost its ending somewhere...
Two Years Later (and Olivia's back in Mid-World) - Fringe (G), Timestamp prompt fill.
Down Passages We Did Not Take - Longmire (novel canon), Post A Serpent's Tooth, Walt's always been an expert when it comes to shouldering the blame.

I've been playing around a bit with Lightroom - it's about as complicated a piece of software as I can handle for post-processing without getting frustrated and finding something better to do. The other night gave me some really good material to work with:
( low light, long exposures, and empty spaces... )

In other news... two things actually -
1. iOS7 seems to have killed wifi on my iPhone 4s. Which would be more annoying than anything if it weren't for the fact that some process or another is still running in the background that I can't kill and is draining my battery at an alarming rate. I've even gone so far as reset it to factory image, but no luck. We'll see what the Apple store people have to say about it today, even though it's off warranty. I feel naked without it at the moment.

2. Google's Photo is using Picasa as their in-browser photo editing tool now. This is probably old news, but new to me. I use the app and like it a lot for it's simplicity and control, as well as it not depending on a bunch of pre-set filters heavy on the retro look. (you can use those too, but they're not your only option)

*Eta: it's not iOS7 to blame, but one of the four hundred or so times I've dropped my phone that broke the antenna. Crud. Need Velcro fingers or something...

Went to go stargazing and this happened:



( Six more of varying degrees of interesting )

Related, I got two separate requests for pre-orders on the yearly calendar I put together this past weekend. In years past I've just been uploading the photos to Walmart, filling out the template, and then having them printed at the closest store to whomever was picking up the order. Price/convenience/quality, it was the easiest, however now that I'm printing more than a handful, it makes sense to use it to partially finance my hobby. Just trying to figure out how to do it without a) a huge investment on my part, and b) not losing the trust of the people interested in the first place.

- Apparently I'm incapable of staying awake through the entirety of the first Iron Man movie. That's four attempts and four failures now. Always at the same spot. Subliminal messages, perhaps? Hypnosis?

- I'm four months behind on reading my National Geographic subscription and I feel kind of guilty about that because it was a gift. And it's not that I don't find the articles interesting; it's just that the theme of every single piece since the most recent editor took over seems to be how humans are destroying the planet. Even in a recent story about rare and dying languages, they managed to slip a line or two in about it. Now, I'm not oblivious to the impact humans have on our planet and how that shapes our cultures, far from it - one of my personal photography projects is documenting the wild spaces around where I live before they are swallowed up by development. But generally your NatGeo target audience is already well-aware of the fact and don't need the point driven home story after story. I just don't look forward to feeding my guilt complex every month by mail anymore.

- Checked out Defiance finally because I saw it had Rockne S. O'Bannon's name attached to it. Early show analysis? Needs more Muppets. That is all.

- I would be finished the sweater I've been working on all winter if I only had one arm. Didn't I just do this part? How do you keep interested in long projects when you're thisclose to the end?

Memorable, no? Presenting, The 21 First Lines meme:

( My 21 favorite: )

I always struggle with the first line - not only does it need to set the hook for the reader, but it also sets the tone for me for all the rest that come after it. Sometimes I have to stop myself from spewing the entire story out into that one first sentence. If I were writing anything right now (which I'm not because of reasons that are trivial), it would be fun to have a ficathon where your prompt was your first line.